Emails fail to send after attempt to upgrade software – part one

Simon Isham

4 years ago

By Simon Isham–

If you are a faculty or staff member at U of L, you may have missed an important email the afternoon of June 10. Student email was unaffected.

The U of L IT department performed maintenance at noon June 10 in preparation for the move to Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft’s anti-spam and anti-malware application. An error with the process caused some external emails to go undelivered to their intended @louisville.edu recipients between the hours of 12 p.m. and 3 p.m.

The university chose Tuesday at noon for the upgrade because it was a time of relatively low email traffic at the university, and technical support from Microsoft is better during the day.

University spokesperson Mark Hebert said that Microsoft demanded that the upgrades be made, and that U of L IT had little say in the matter. He said the error was Microsoft’s: they chose to abort the upgrade process, and “delay this implementation until the issues are resolved.”

Though there is no backup of any of the emails sent, senders may have noticed that something was amiss: they would have been notified that their emails had failed to deliver to their intended recipients.

An email sent out later that evening from the IT Department to faculty and staff suggested that those expecting to receive important messages from outside the university should “please contact the senders and ask them to resend the message. ”